This time, the props go to Zach and Jaime for bringing this one to my attention (though, if you’re looking, there are as many people praising Playtime as one of film’s greatest experimental triumphs as there are cast members in the film itself, including Rosenbaum). For those who aren’t familiar with this one, it’s a 1967 French comedy by director/actor/contortionist Jacques Tati, and at it’s very core it’s an extremely democratic comedic romp (again, Rosenbaum’s designation). By “democratic,” he means that it is a film about “the people” as opposed to “the individual.” There isn’t a single close-up shot in the whole film; they’re all long shots of Paris crowds — the flowergirls, the travel agents, the doormen, the families, the drunks, and also the flocks of American tourists. It’s invigorating in ways that most other movies aren’t even within earshot of because, since you are in charge of where you want your focus to go amongst the rich frames of people, you truly feel like you’re a participant in the film. When a waiter at a mod restaurant rips his pants on a sharp chairback, the entire group of people within the shot fix their gaze on the same place that your own eyes are drawn to, and the effect is supremely generous. You get what you give, but Tati gives so much in addition, as there are indeed conventional comedic “gags” in the mix too — my personal favorites include the rippling-effect that a jet of air-conditioning has on an old woman’s exposed back, and the non-adventures of the world’s most self-centered, preening waiter. In many ways, the film achieves the heightening effect that De Palma’s split-screens do; only here there aren’t two rigid halves on the screen, there are hundreds of criss-crossing “virtual” split screens that even go so far as into the third dimension (not literally, but background and foreground are of equal importance in Playtime). When Tati isn’t heightening one’s senses with clean, exciting logistics, he’s tickling our fancy with light fantasy (such as the final, one-for-the-ages scene involving a simply enchanting traffic jam). Tati the actor (he plays the bumbling Hulot in this and many of his other films) is both graceful and unpredictable. Playtime offers up concrete proof that Tati the director is also graceful and unpredictable… and in a class all his own.

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Before getting into the film proper, a digression: what the hell happened to leading female performances like Susannah York’s? I remember a few years back Pauline Kael remarked of Good Will Hunting that, although she found the film worthless (agreed), she found Minnie Driver’s voice a pleasant distraction. “She has a wonderful gurgly quality of voice,” she said something like. Susannah York has a gurgly, husky, kazoo voice not unlike her contemporary Glenda Jackson’s. She also has a hell-banshee squeal of a scream. But what I’m truly talking about, I think, is her sexuality. In this, the age of the abstinence movement in school sex education, female performances like York’s in Images are simply extinct. York juggles three men in Images in a nightmare-cum-fantasy-cum-nightmare-again scenario. Her performance deftly bounds from hot to hot-tempered to frigid to carefree within seconds while Vilmos Zsigmond’s claustrophobic framing breathlessly tries to keep up. And when it doesn’t – as in some spiky shock cuts that announce the disappearance of one beau and the entrance of another – the effect is shocking and abrupt. These moments (in addition to the multiple appearances of glass wind chimes and a perversely voyeuristic camera-tripod) chronicle the hot flashes of guilt and revulsion that flit through York’s mind when she momentarily forgets just which man she’s with. “Did I use someone else’s name?” she momentarily asks herself (actually, she does throughout the film, as Rene Auberjonois plays husband Hugh, Marcel Bozzuffi plays the dead French flame Rene, and Hugh Millais plays the “old crotch” Marcel). Interesting that the film opens with her own subterfuge playing out against her, when she seemingly crank-calls herself to spur jealous thoughts that Auberjonois is cheating on her. Also interesting is that, for the majority of the film, the puzzle that York works on with is rarely seen, even in unfinished state. Altman seems to be saying that we the audience needn’t know the specifics of her scenario (i.e. the border that York is averse to piecing together first to make the puzzle easier) to be emotionally affected by it. In fact, in the stunning penultimate sequence in which a driving York giggles and looks back in the rearview or over into the passenger seat and we realize she’s looking right into the camera lens, Altman fleetingly indicates the audience itself. As an aside, in addition to Zsigmond’s stunning long shots and intense close-ups (the depth of field in Images is as mutable and wide-of-girth as is York’s performance), John Williams’ rattling music is something of a revelation to anyone who (like myself) thought of him as lost in Wagnerian leitmotif-land and major thirds and fifths.

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Revisionist history pegs Quintet as the negative lynchpin of Altman’s career. Before Quintet, according to these historians, Altman was an unpredictable but always interesting filmmaker whose next movie would be sure to reinvent and augment his growing reputation (granted, some minor films like Buffalo Bill & the Indians and Brewster McCloud suggested that quantity was as much a concern for Altman in his body of work as was quality). After Quintet, he was never to be trusted without compunction again. Every upcoming Altman film was thought just as likely to be a pretentious piffle as it was a masterwork. Of course, I editorialize that it’s only gotten worse in the ‘90s, as come lately people only seem to be responding to his signature large-canvas ensemble works and ignoring the smaller-scale pleasures of Kansas City and Cookie’s Fortune. This suggests, to me, that for most people Altman’s innovative days are over, which is sad. All of this leads to why I looked at Quintet, possibly the most loathed Altman film of all, with a mixed feeling of nostalgia and respect. I’m not going to go so far as to call it Altman’s neglected masterpiece, or anything, but I will assert that more respect is in order here. Really, could there have been a more knee-jerk, whiny imputation against Quintet than that it was slow-paced, downbeat, and torpidly philosophical? I mean, at what point did anyone expect a post-apocalyptic abyss of death and meaninglessness to break into song? It’s true that Quintet’s vision of the importance of a solipsistic individual against their environment is, unlike Images, remote, almost maddeningly vague. But the open spaces that permeate the film, those scenes well into the film that get lost in expositional jargon, are the precise moments that I found myself most acutely surrendering myself to Altman’s meditation on the end of it all. The much derided philosophical ramblings that Vittorio Gassman and Fernando Rey insistently sermonize are gaseous and full of shit, but rather than assuming it to be a shortcoming, it filled me with more sympathy for humanity’s plight (more so than Bibi Andersson’s unadorned lamentations that it could all end any day). These lost souls, encased in extremely photogenic ice prisons (even Quintet’s most staunch haters know this much to be true), have lost control over everything that they previously knew. At the mercy of the elements, of their environments, even of the dogs that they once had domesticated, the one thing they have left in their own hands is their lives. Turning survival into a convoluted and (deliberately) arbitrary game is their way of validating their humanity on pre-apocalypse terms. Quintet is soul brother to Images in cinematic terms in that Tom Pierson’s musical score is both fragile and hellzapoppin (according to City Pages’ Matthew Wilder, it’s rooted in a 12-tone scale). And Jean Boffety’s frame is edged with frost, creating a more cramped, irised-in feel throughout the film. The early scene in which Paul Newman stands in the center of a labyrinth of webbed-with-cracks glass panes is flat-out stunning, an icy and mysterious place one could easily get lost in, much like Quintet itself.

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